So sentient is Sydney that there is a constant seething layer of creature invasion. Falconer lists how we put up with bats destroying trees in the Botanic Gardens, cockatoos pirouetting atop city buildings, beady-eyed lorikeets, disarming possums peeing in our ceilings, less charming mosquitoes, spiders, midges, crickets, cockroaches, Christmas beetles, hairy caterpillars, Bogong moths, flies, sharks and centipedes, seagulls eating chips, and filthy long-beaked ibis languidly ferreting through rubbish bins. Falconer notes that there is ‘a strong sense that the city still longs to return to the bush, to shrug us off’, and wonders if it may even be the case that in a place where everything seems to contain its eruptive opposite, ‘the counterforce to the city’s staggering, almost infinite, natural blessings is the desire for their erasure … that extreme beauty, especially one so unanchored, brings with it a countervailing wish for its destruction’.

As she examines Sydney’s past, Falconer discovers that while colonials won external battles to conquer their new surroundings, an inner malaise remained. They struggled to feel at home or to comprehend where they were: metropolitan Sydney was ‘built on the great bed of a prehistoric flood plain’ and these ‘ghost creeks ... still long to be active, as owners of houses built in their vanquished beds soon find out when it rains, as the old watercourses rise to clog drains and well up through walls’. Any resident of low-lying areas such as Chippendale, where I live, will tell you that these natural forces stay the same, and the rising damp continues its ascent.

Falconer’s mix of memoir and essay is especially subtle when contrasting the grimy but fecund city with the suburbs, which ‘feel weirdly tranquil, as if nothing but catastrophe can bring them back to life’. In recounting her attempts to discover the history of Roseville, where her parents moved when she was a child, Falconer speaks of a party of convicts who in 1791 escaped, hoping to walk to China, but had to turn back beaten, through the sticky mud and mangroves of Middle Harbour. ‘No other major city is as penetrated by remnant wilderness as Sydney.’ The inner suburbs are still pinned by this ‘unbowed bush light’ and there is that sense that we are still camping out, terrified and displaced, in a strange land where the scrub is secretive with primal danger, with the power ‘to both crush and exalt’.

It is Patrick White, Falconer believes, who has captured the city’s ‘primal textures, of stubborn fecundity and inarticulate neglect’. She finds in his novels her own childhood ‘eerily preserved’. White’s ‘most intense channelling of the city’ is in his novel The Vivisector (1970), in which the artist Hurtle Duffield has an attitude of ‘constant simmering of love and rageful loathing’ towards turn-of-the-century Paddington; where he struggles to express anything spiritual or artistic, wedged between the lazy beauty of the city and ‘incurious Englishness’. In the end, Duffield paints pure texture, ‘as if he has finally connected with the ancient, dumb thing that Slessor sought’ in his poem ‘Five Bells’.

The value of Sydney is in its philosophical considerations, how it looks at our idea of us as a city and a nation. Falconer says: ‘It is Sydney’s wild mix of the stunning and unplanned, of glitz and rot, by contrast, that gives it its very distinct cultural and intellectual life.’ At the same time, she speaks of our troubled sense that we could be another, better city, ‘the freighting of our dreams with thoughts of elsewhere’. Her fineness of thought provokes us to consider the beginnings of our racism as a nation and the treatment meted out to its first people. From Café Sydney’s vantage point at Circular Quay, the Eora would have watched the First Fleet sail in to the harbour. Once the Customs House, with its infamous 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, it served to keep non-whites out. But it is the Eora who, despite their loss of livelihood, country, and culture, remain an enduring and potent presence, even though they are still not acknowledged in our constitution, their human rights traduced into the twenty-first century. They remain, proudly for them and perhaps for the betterment of our collective psyche, inerasable, like their handprints found incised into the sandstone foundations upon which we drew the scribble of first settlement.

With its baroque endpaper maps and moody slipcover, Sydney is beautifully produced, and the series idea a credit to its publisher.

CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2010